Dad counted from the other side. “Five, four, three, two, one.”

Talon pushed his arms through the opening and Dad pulled. Fortunately, Talon’s shoulders weren’t too wide to fit.

“Got him,” came Dad’s voice from the other side.

I stretched out on the floor. “You’re not bleeding, are you?”

“No.”

I exhaled sharply. “Then grab my arms, too. But make sure you grab cloth and not skin.”

“Got it.”

“Tell me when.”

“Three, two, one.”

Dad pulled and I swear I left skin on the stone floor. It hurt, but I was out and so was Talon.

The kid made a break for the open door. Dad jerked him back.

“Not so fast,” Dad snapped.

Talon yanked his arm back—at least he tried.

“There is only one way out of here.” Dad’s voice was clipped and hard. “So we have to take you with us. Chances are we’re going to run into Sarad Nukpana or at the very least more Khrynsani. You will do exactly as told, precisely when told.”

Talon turned and went toe-to-toe with my dad. I kept any and all expression off my face. Oh, this was going to be good.

“And what junior knight wannabe is going to give me orders?”

Dad didn’t say a word; he just let Talon see him, truly see him. The real him with his old soul, not the twenty-year-old, baby-faced Guardian whose body he inhabited. I knew why he did it. Talon was the type that you had to scare the shit out of to get his attention. And for once we had to have Talon’s complete attention and unquestioned cooperation. All of our lives depended on it.

Talon knew what he was seeing and his eyes went as wide as saucers. I thought he was going to faint. The last time he’d done that was after seeing Phaelan slice the ear off of an undead minion of the demon queen. I had to admit that ear plop-ping on the floor followed by oozing black blood was kind of gruesome.

The kid’s mouth opened and words finally made it out. “Who . . . What are you?”

“Talon, meet my dad.”

“How can you be—”

Dad didn’t bat an eye. “I’m 934 years old.”

“Damn, you’re old,” Talon blurted.

And who said teenagers aren’t tactful?

Dad released Talon’s arm, but his hard eyes kept the kid anchored to the spot. “If you do anything to endanger my daughter, Sarad Nukpana will no longer be your worst problem. Do I make myself clear?”

“Completely.”

“That’s what I want to hear.”

“Can you find your way back to Sarad Nukpana’s bunker?” I asked Talon.

“I was blindfolded.”

Crap.

“Any noises, lights, anything you can tell us?”

“No noise and a really tight blindfold.”

Double crap.

“We’re going to have to get past Nukpana to get out of here,” I told him. “I have some business with him; you don’t. Your job is to survive. So be ready to run.”

“Born that way.”

Dad was by the door, listening. Then in one fluid and silent move, both of his swords were out of their scabbards and clenched in his hands.

Oh no.

Piaras.

I armed myself and quickly took up position beside Dad.

His lips were next to my ear. “Piaras was there. Now he’s not.”

Damn.

Chapter 21

I was relieved to see that not only were the dead goblins right where we’d left them, but they were also still dead. Lately “dead” had become an entirely too relative term.

Talon’s breath came in a startled hiss when he tripped over one of the bodies. Oh yeah, he was only half-goblin. Elven blue eyes, not goblin black—no preternatural night vision for Talon.

Talon quickly stepped back into the shadows with me on one side of the bunker door. Dad slipped silently into the dark on the other side. Talon didn’t need anyone to tell him to stay quiet.

The bunker’s dim light spilled out into the tunnel, just enough for us to see that we were out here all alone. From the tunnel in either direction there were no sounds, no light, no life. At least not any that I could sense.

And definitely no Piaras.

The Saghred’s presence inside of me was perfectly still, waiting. Waiting for something that it didn’t see fit to share with me—at least not yet.

Life with a soul-sucking rock. Never a dull moment.

If Piaras had been veiling next to the wall, he would have stepped out by now. I didn’t need intuition, seeker magic, or the Saghred to tell me that he wasn’t here. Perhaps he thought he could guard us better from farther down the tunnel, where he could intercept any goblins before they knew we were in Talon’s cell and trap us there. If he’d scouted ahead, we’d find him.

Unless he’d been captured. In which case, we’d be joining him shortly. By activating that iron door and its ward, Sarad Nukpana had given us no choice but to go forward. That was the direction Talon’s guards had come from, so I thought it safe to assume that a certain regenerating goblin psychopath would be happily awaiting our arrival at the other end.

I had a feeling there wouldn’t be any ambush or attack—nothing to prevent us from reaching Sarad Nukpana’s bunker. The goblin would do everything short of putting out a welcome mat. He needed to kill me. He wanted to kill Dad. And he would enjoy killing Piaras and Talon.

Every goblin down here would be able to see us coming. It didn’t matter if we were stumbling around in the dark or had a hundred lightglobes lighting our way. Light or dark—either one would give us away.

But most of all, Sarad Nukpana knew I was here. The Saghred knew he was here. So anything I did would just postpone the inevitable showdown. But that didn’t mean we couldn’t sneak up on his guards and even the odds a little in our favor. I didn’t want Sarad Nukpana in front of me and who knew how many of his minions creeping up behind me.

I spoke on the barest breath. “Dad, tell me how to do a negating spell.”

He arched a brow at me. “Raine, it takes more than few seconds to teach—”

“Just tell me,” I said flatly. “The rock and I learn fast.”

He glanced at Talon. “It’s an individual spell, so it won’t cover him. We’ll have to—”

“I think the rock will cover all of us. It wants Sarad Nukpana. Badly.”

I wanted the same thing, but for a different reason. The rock wanted to eat him; I just wanted him dead, preferably the old-fashioned way—just steel, no soul sucking. The longer we took getting to the goblin, the longer he’d have to prepare for us.

A prepared demigod would be very bad.

Dad told me the spell. I understood, but most important, the rock knew what to do and how to do it.

A few minutes later, we were sporting a solid negating spell courtesy of my magic and the rock’s knowledge. Dad and I wove a quartet of lightglobes and sent them down the hall in pairs at intervals of about twenty feet. We stayed behind the second pair close enough to the light to be able to see what or who was in front of us, but far enough away to have a hope of not being glaring targets. And if the negating spell was doing its job, any goblins would see four lightglobes coming down the tunnel by themselves with no one behind them. Goblins liked the dark, so you had to wonder what, if anything, they considered spooky. I knew that four disembodied lightglobes floating down a dark, deserted tunnel would do it for me.

The spell just negated our presence. Blades would still work, Talon’s voice could still do its thing—and now the Saghred was itching to get a piece of the action.

We hadn’t gone fifty yards before the rock started stirring. We were getting close. The Saghred could smell Sarad Nukpana, and through our bond, so could I. Gleefully sadistic, relishing the torment he’d caused, the death he’d brought, and eager to do it all again. The Saghred was experiencing much the same emotions. It had absorbed Nukpana and held him captive for nearly three months. It knew its own. And now, so did I.

I also knew something else. I had never been this scared in my whole life.

Facing Sarad Nukpana in Markus’s parlor had paled in comparison to this. This was raw terror of the whimpering kind. I tried to steel myself against the fear, at least the whimpering part. I could deal with Nukpana’s goons finding me if I got stupid and tripped over something in the dark, but I’d die of embarrassment before they could kill me if a whimper actually made it out of my mouth. Though that didn’t stop my nearly overwhelming need to do it. I bit my lip to stop any wayward, cowardly noises.

The only way I could defeat Sarad Nukpana was to use the Saghred. And the only thing the rock was interested in doing was eating Nukpana’s soul and anyone he’d consumed. That included one elven general, two ancient psychotic mages, and Rudra Muralin. The thought of their souls being forcibly pulled through me and into the Saghred was enough to make me want to scream my throat raw. I was going into this confrontation monumentally ignorant of what else to do and fatally unprepared for any of it. I’d tricked Sarad Nukpana once; that kind of luck wasn’t going to happen to me again. Phaelan would say that a Benares makes her own luck.

Phaelan wasn’t here. I was, and I didn’t want to be.

The farther we went, the worse the air got. Then my brain registered what my nose had caught wind of and my skin tried to crawl somewhere and hide.

Musty air and mold.

I’d smelled it before. In Sarad Nukpana’s coach behind Markus’s house. The smell was here, right here. The actual smell, not Nukpana’s memory of it.

We were within spitting distance of Sarad Nukpana’s lair.

Step into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.

I stopped and so did Dad and Talon. Dad didn’t question why. Talon just settled for keeping his mouth shut. I was grateful for both.

I slowly dimmed our lightglobes, then let them flicker out of existence. We didn’t need them anymore. We could see just fine.

I’d seen it through Sarad Nukpana’s memories. Now I could see it with my own eyes.